Sustainable Development Goals for Greening University of Auckland

Presentation Notes:

Holistic sustainable development

Civil society push

Green climate fund

Climate action, energy source

Respect all the knowledge/learning behind us

How can you contribute the sustainable development goals? AUT Public awareness, not only businesses and Government

How individuals contribute?

Educate - action

18th Formate: Why we should? Instead of we must do (People don't like being told what to do)

Potential benefit environment contribution in how businesses can play

Whole process is the challenge

Technical exercise - its a night but not a human right

How can we motivate ourselves to do so?

Diplomatic product in all these 17 goals

All 17 would help human rights change involved University of Auckland offers Sustainability week where staff, students and industries are invited to attend a fascinating week of inspiring and widely informative set of events based on sustainability and business. In each day, the programme is set to have various topics and issues presented by numerous high profile sustainability specialists, professors, CEOs and industry related staff that you must RSVP in order to attend. The topics included in the week of discussions are sustainability of our Food System Business, Finance and Investment, Social Sustainability and Diversity, Environmental Footprint, Transport and WasteEnergy and Climate Change. I attended the subject of, 'Our Environmental Footprint, Transport and Waste' lecture on, 'Greening our University and Reducing our footprint at the Business School' at 10am – 12pm Thursday 7 April. The speakers are Charlotte Blyth, the University of Auckland Environmental Coordinator and Dinah Towle from the University of Auckland Energy Centre. In a room filled with people, I noticed the age group of attendees are mature and look polished. Getting into the beginning of the lecture, Charlotte describes the aim of the sustainable development goals to be a holistic approach, she emphasises the need to push society into civilisation and taking action to climate change by generating ways to gain funding.

In response to this presentation lecture, I felt like the information given was encouraging as I felt like my interest in sustainability is hugely supported, and that people are actually extremely concerned to influence change, just like me. I know AUT University have their own Sustainability Club, but having attended University of Auckland's Sustainability Week, I was impressed with the capacity of research and dissection for each issues, followed by actions for change. I particularly liked how Dr. Lesley Stone, Sustainability and Environment Manager said, “When looking for members, the most important consideration is motivation.

The idea is to build up a group of people who are passionate about one or more aspects of sustainability, and who want to take action and encourage others to do so too.” That is what I struggled with when I came to approach my project with, 'how do I measure the success of my issue?' “A big part of the impact on a goal as large as increasing the sustainability of the University comes from small changes in everyday tasks,” says Linda.